From the summary portion of Chapter 2 (The Mindless Agent):
For Richard Dawkins, the chosen metaphors for evolution are given in the titles of his books: The Selfish Gene (1979), The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Climbing Mount Improbable (1996). Better than allusions to the perfect designer of the clumsy engineer, Dawkins's metaphors convey lack of foresight, the tentativeness, and the luck (or providence) of natural selection.
[...]
Common to all these metaphors, of course, is the idea of some agent-like initiator as the cause of complex developments and behaviors. The introduction of agent metaphors in science is ironic and not fortuitous. It is ironic because scientific explanation differs from both religious and commonsense interpretations of complex events of uncertain origin by excluding rather than conjuring up agent-based accounts. Agent-based interpretations of complex events, as I later show in the next chapter, appear to represent the default strategy of human mind, that is, an evolved strategy that is universal, innate, easily triggered by the appropriate input, and difficult to inhibit.
So even for "hardcore" atheists like Richard Dawkins, agency intuition spills over into science writing. I suspect Dawkins would explain the titles of his books as being as much marketing as anything else. "The Blind Watchmaker" is a bit more intriguing than "The Evolution of the Genome" to the layman.
From what I can tell, this 58 page pdf is a mini-version of Atran's book:
Religion’s evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion.
6 comments:
The author is clueless:
...by excluding rather than conjuring up agent-based accounts.
The person has no idea how scientific method works. You can't prove anything, so you have to refute it.
Me thinks the book would probably be better used as TP than anything else.
Holy smokes! I like the new layout Chris; very snazzy.
romunov, the author is a director of research at CNRS ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNRS ). I think he understands how science works very well. The science I know does reject agent based explanations. Biochemists do not chalk up transcription to bodiless minds, and chemists do not explain electron transfer by attributing it to any cognizant agent.
Brian, thanks for the compliment!
I am writing a book review right now about The Panda's Black Box. The sixth chapter is about how Darwin's metaphors can cause people to be confused about agency. The author, Robert Maxwell Young seems to think that IDC folks are justified (how justified Young won't nail down) in believing that there is a designer because naturalist reductionist writing should avoid metaphors like those Atran cites. He goes even further, saying that the idea of natural selection is problematic because our understanding of the term selection is laden with intention or deliberation as in the case of artificial selection. It follows then, for this author, that somehow because we use these metaphors, the IDC folks are justified to default to the argument from design. No matter that we use other metaphors in other sciences like chemistry which Darwin pointed out by discussing "electoral affinity."
I think Atran is right. We can't escape seeking intentionality in everything around us.
This line of discussion is very interesting to me. I have long been interested in the roles of metaphor in science. It has helped me to think of this topic in terms of the theory of conceptual metaphor championed by Lakoff and Johnson (Metaphors we Live By; Philosophy in the Flesh). In my book "Making Truth: Metaphor in Science" I attempt to show how metaphorical thinking is inescapably part of all scientific thought. Causation is a central element in scientific reasoning, and scientists very frequently resort to teleological language in explaining their results in terms of a model. Biology is rife with this. The trick is not to take metaphors literally! They are vehicles for understanding, not assertions about how the world actually is.
Thanks for the comments guys (sorry about the delayed response).
Ted, your book looks very interesting, I hope I can get a copy of it soon.
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